Censoring an Iranian Love Story

by Shahriar Mandanipour; Sara Khalili

  I will say:

  Sir, the parting of a young couple on a bridge isn’t as free of danger as you might think. Bridges are not endless. Even the longest bridges in the world, from the right and the left, lead to streets and neighborhoods. In these streets and neighborhoods there are plenty of girls and boys and men and women. In fact, it is possible for our beautiful Sara to get trapped by one of those gangs that have recently been kidnapping girls or by one of their good-looking members who makes an innocent girl fall in love with him and takes her home, and there they film the lovemaking or rape scene and sell copies of it on the black market. You probably are not aware that the most provocative American and Japanese porno films are sold on the black market for two or three thousand tumans, but these Iranian films, even though they are poorly made with no lighting and with the girl not being a real blond, are bought and sold for twelve thousand tumans. On the other side of the bridge, too, how do we know that Dara, who is a good-looking young man, and the sorrow of love has left a romantic look in his eyes, does not walk onto a street where a bad girl falls in love with him. Please allow this innocent girl and boy to walk together.

  My predicament, however, is that Sara and Dara cannot walk together for very long. The patrols from the Campaign Against Social Corruption, armed with Kalashnikovs, could arrive at any moment and arrest them.

  You will probably say:

  Well, they can claim to be brother and sister.

  I will reply:

  No, they cannot.

  Ask me why and I will explain:

  If they claim to be siblings or even cousins, two patrols, a man and a woman, will take each of them aside and interrogate them separately. They will ask, for example, what their grandfather’s or brother-in-law’s name is. If Sara and Dara have previously exchanged these sorts of details, the questions will then extend to the color and brand of the refrigerator in their house, their neighbor’s last name, and similar basic questions. If their answers do not match, Sara and Dara will be taken to the detention center for the socially corrupt. There they will join homeless addicts, pimps, prostitutes, and other morally depraved people. In one of my stories, I led my protagonist and antagonist to a cemetery as their meeting place. They sat on the grave of the boy’s mother and quietly talked. At the time, the anticorruption officers’ imagination did not extend to a girl and a boy taking advantage of the grave of an unsuspecting and helpless dead mother to set the stage for their sin.

  Dara asks:

  “What color is the refrigerator in your house?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know how it popped into my head … Tell me, what kind of flowers and trees do you have in your front yard?”

  “We have geraniums and violets, and an apple tree. Why?”

  Sara does not receive an answer. She thinks what a secretive character and complicated mind Dara has. Having a secretive character, being complicated and quiet, are good characteristics to have to pique a girl’s curiosity and interest. Of course, only up until marriage.

  Now Sara and Dara are passing in front of Qajar Opticians. The store’s decor is no less stylish than the most fashionable boutiques in Paris.

  Sara says:

  “I have to buy a pair of large sunglasses.”

  The store owner, Agha Mohammad, with a beardless face and feminine mannerisms, greets them.

  Several centuries and many years ago, Agha Mohammad of the Qajar Dynasty was one of Iran’s warrior kings. After the conquest of an Iranian town, in one fell swoop he commanded that the eyes of the townspeople be censored from their sockets and piled up in the town square.

  Sara tries on several designer sunglasses, most of which are Chinese made knockoffs, and walks out with a pair of large Ray-Bans covering her black eyes. Agha Mohammad follows her with his eyes as she passes in front of the store window and sighs:

  “What a shame for those beautiful eyes and that tantalizing face to be hidden behind those glasses.”

  In his youth, Agha Mohammad was held hostage in the court of another Iranian king who ordered Agha Mohammad’s testicles be deleted from his body with a pair of special scissors.

  If you ask me why I have recounted this historic detail, which seems unrelated to our story, I will immediately respond:

  Clearly, you are still not as familiar with Iranian symbols as you should be … My dears! The point of this historic detail is to remind you that in Iran scissors had uses other than their common utility and other than cutting out excess sentences from newspapers and manuscripts …

  Sara and Dara arrive at an Internet café.

  Ask me if there are Internet cafés in Tehran.

  Of course there are. What image do you have of Iran? Are you like that person I once met at the literary festival in Stavanger, Norway, who after my long-winded talk on modern and postmodern literature in Iran asked:

  “Have you heard of the Internet in Iran?”

  Or like my son’s classmate in Providence, Rhode Island, who asked him:

  “You don’t have cars in Iran, you ride camels; why do you want to make a nuclear bomb?”

  Faced with such questions, many Iranians quickly point to the past glories of our land and explain that Iran is Persia, and they remind you that our country has more than twenty-five hundred years of history and civilization. But since I am a writer and have a bit of an imagination, I will not make this mistake, because I know that after my explanations you will say: Well, yes, you had a great empire with all this history and a civilization replete with culture, science, and architecture. Something, however, must have gone very wrong for you to have fallen on such pitiful times that today the Russians are building your nuclear power plant. If these Russians knew how to build a reactor, their Chernobyl wouldn’t have gone bust.

  In response to this comment I will steadfastly keep my silence. Not because you are right, but because in Iran, as an Iranian, especially as a journalist or a writer or even a nuclear scientist, I am not allowed to express my opinions of our government’s nuclear energy policies. As it is, with this love story alone, I will have enough headaches to deal with.

  Then come and let me take you, together with our protagonist and antagonist, to an Iranian Internet café.

  Here too I prefer not to write that Sara and Dara secretly lock eyes. However, I am now obliged, as is customary in all love stories, to describe Sara and her feminine beauties. Otherwise, neither you nor Mr. Petrovich will read my story … Aside from her large black eyes, the first striking feature in Sara’s face is her luscious lips that are perpetually smoldering as though from thirst. Well, if I write such a sentence, Mr. Petrovich will immediately demand that it be deleted.

  I therefore write:

  Sara’s lips resemble plump ripe cherries with their delicate skin about to split from the heat of the sun.

  So far our story has not progressed badly, although critic-approving tension has yet to build. Our next predicament surfaces in the dialogue that follows.

  Sara says:

  “They really hit hard with those batons.”

  Dara says:

  “Some of the batons give an electric shock. They paralyze you for a while.”

  Ask:

  Well, what is wrong with this?

  I will answer:

  These lines are appalling. I don’t mean politically … Don’t you get it? If you live in a country where its fourteen-hundred-year-old language contains thousands of symbols, metaphors, and similes that in addition to their mystical meanings and interpretations also whisper of amorous and sexual connotations, and if you are someone who from the crack of dawn until dusk has the job of vigilantly reading stories and poems lest there be sexually suggestive symbols and metaphors in them, then surely your mind will instinctively suspect every letter for fear that its connotations may together commit a sin in the shadows of the reader’s mind.

  Now you’ve grasped the quandary of our story. Yes, the difficulty is with the name and the s
hape of a baton … Sara and Dara must therefore talk about something else. But I cannot even have one say to the other:

  Let’s talk about something else …

  Because “thing,” with its inherent ambiguity, can be interpreted as the most vile and libelous word in the Farsi language. In interpreting words for their sexual undertones, the Farsi language is exceptionally rich and clever. Yet I cannot put my pathetic protagonist and antagonist in an Internet café with no dialogue and no action. Let us picture them:

  Sara wants to stir her hot chocolate, but she drops her spoon on the floor. Dara takes his spoon out of his teacup and offers it to her …

  Not a bad scene for enriching a simple communication. Although this too could be labeled a sexual metaphor.

  Ask me how, and I will say:

  Years ago, in a friend’s novel, a motorcyclist runs out of gas on a dirt road in the desert. For miles around, there is no woman in sight, not even a peasant. Finally, the driver of a pickup truck stops to help … The sentence underlined by Mr. Petrovich for deletion was this: “The motorcyclist inserts a plastic hose in the gas tank of the pickup truck and sucks on it. As soon as gasoline begins to flow, he inserts the hose in his motorcycle’s gas tank …” If I and my novelist friend and all Iranian writers had put our heads together, we would never have consciously recognized the subtext of this modern, sexually explicit, gasoline-related, motorized scene. It is thus that the late Roland Barthes’s theory of the Death of the Author is, in my dear homeland, subconsciously practiced. We may therefore have to forgo the lending-of-the-spoon scene. To have the two characters of my story finally say something to each other, I give them a few watered-down lines.

  Sara says:

  “The beauty of spring saddens me … Unlike spring, autumn is an unassuming and humble season that quickly makes friends and grows dear.”

  She adds:

  “I wish I were seventy years old.”

  Then together they declare:

  “… Yes, I like autumn …”

  By concurrently uttering this simple, romantic, and harmless sentence, the two are transformed into the happy-go-lucky characters of cheap romance novels. But I know that such characters belong in nineteenth-century Paris, not in the city of Tehran. I am therefore convinced that their fate will be similar to that of William Shakespeare’s disaster-prone lovers, eternally entangled in a convoluted and ill-fated tragedy.

  Ask me, How could such romantic simplicity in the twenty-first century lead to a complicated tragedy?

  I will answer:

  You see, at twenty-two and thirty-something, Sara and Dara are both virgins. Sara’s virginity is a foregone conclusion, because according to Iranian values (traditional and intellectual), a girl who is neither married nor a virgin cannot possibly fall in love; she has been deceived by false love, has lost her virginity, and must therefore become a woman of ill repute. Should her father or her educated brothers, who night and day chase after their nonvirgin girlfriends, ever discover her secret, they will either drive her to suicide, or if they are truly fanatical, they will kill her. The law of the land gives them the right to protect their honor … Dara’s virginity, too, should not be a surprise. A few months after the Islamic revolution triumphed, all the brothels across Iran that had not already been burned down were shut down, and it was ordered that the shameful word “prostitute” be deleted from the Farsi-language lexicon and replaced by the phrase “vulnerable lady.” Well, a few madams were executed and a large number of vulnerable ladies were left abandoned on the streets. Now, influenced by German law and culture, you want to say:

  Then the likes of Dara have access to the vulnerable ladies on the streets, and at the age of thirty-something they should no longer be virgins.

  Have the courage to say it like a brave Berliner for me to respond:

  First of all, since the vulnerable ladies began working on the streets, their rates have gone up. Second, in Iran, one condition for being able to make vulnerable ladies vulnerable is to at least have an empty house somewhere. Third, if you are arrested while making a vulnerable lady vulnerable, if you are married, your punishment will be death by stoning, and if you are single, you will receive approximately eighty whiplashes, the same as what that vulnerable lady will receive … But none of these is the reason for Dara’s virginity. His problem is that he cannot even make contact with a vulnerable lady.

  Ask:

  Why …?

  I will answer:

  Because Dara is interested in reading stories and novels. I don’t know about your country, but in mine a good number of people who are readers cannot sleep with prostitutes. They find shame and disgrace in such an act…

  Of course, blushing with embarrassment, Dara wants me to censor this segment of the story to his benefit. Very well … But how can I convey this vital piece of information about the characters of my story to my readers? It is here that the fine art of Iranian storytelling must step in and create a cipher that after the publication of the book will be quickly deciphered by the clever Iranian reader.

  I hesitate to write: “No butterfly has ever transferred pollen from the blossom of sin from Dara’s body to Sara’s body …” It is too scientific, too old, and it reminds us of the bedlam of the butterfly effect. I will therefore write:

  The perspiration of vessl (union, realization, attainment) has yet to seep from the pores of their bodies’ imagination …

  The word vessl, in the ages-old Iranian literature, has many explicit and implicit religious, mystic, amorous, and sexual connotations and hence is not really translatable. A Sufi, after much self-discipline and worship can “attain,” or vessl, with God. A lover who has suffered can after years “unite,” or vessl, with his beloved. A story writer too can “achieve,” or vessl, a good story. I therefore don’t think Mr. Petrovich will be too exacting when it comes to this word. Though I suspect that the words “perspiration” and “pores” will likely make our readers sweat, and the word “imagination” will direct them to other implicit suggestions.

  It is at this very moment that the ghost of the dead poet sitting in a corner at the Internet café notices Sara’s eyes anxiously glancing toward the window, and he is inspired to compose a new simile: two carnivorous black flowers lying in wait for plucked-winged butterflies, for ethereal bees, lewd bees …

  Sara opens her mouth to speak an important sentence revealing a terrifying and diabolical secret. But just like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Faith in “Young Goodman Brown,” who at the moment of bidding farewell to her beloved chooses to remain silent, so does Sara. Dara too has a never-asked question on his mind, but he too keeps silent. And thus, an ominous fate awaits their love.

  Like a good girl, Sara starts to drink her hot chocolate. Like a good boy, Dara sips his tea.

  Sara says:

  “It’s very hot.”

  Dara says:

  “Mine, too.”

  Before I can decide on the word “hot,” a boy with a hairdo similar to the gothic hairstyle of some American teenagers and wearing a Linkin Park T-shirt bursts into the Internet café and in a muffled voice warns:

  “The patrols … !”

  The boy works for the owner of the Internet café as a lookout. The boys and girls quickly separate and rearrange the tables and chairs. The girls pull their scarves down over their highlighted hair, the boys hide their necklaces under their T-shirts. By the time two patrols walk in, the girls are huddled together at one end of the café, the boys are gathered at the opposite end, and they are all staring intently at their computer screens. Sara and Dara, lacking experience, sensed the danger at the very last minute and separated. The patrols carefully inspect each computer screen. Fortunately, everyone has been browsing educational Web sites, Web sites with beautiful pictures of nature and Web sites of government-sponsored newspapers. In Iran millions of Internet sites containing very immoral materials are filtered out by expensive software programs purchased from a very moral American company. Among these, polit
ical anti-revolution Web sites and even the Web sites of Voice of America and the U.S.-sponsored Radio Farda are filtered out. Of course, the man responsible for this Internet censorship is not Mr. Petrovich. All Mr. Petrovich knows about computers is that they are machines that in Iran usually make terrible mistakes. For example, they once printed one million tumans instead of ten thousand tumans on his electricity bill, a mistake that took months of trudging through government bureaus to correct.

  Today the girls and boys are lucky. The patrols only arrest the Linkin Park fan on the charge of exhibiting a Western appearance. But Sara is not feeling well. This is her first brush with such an experience. Color has drained from her face, and she keeps imagining her father clutching at his ailing heart and suffering a heart attack after hearing of her arrest in the company of a young man. If you have detected any similarities between Sara’s father and Mr. Petrovich, I emphatically deny them.

  Besides, Sara must soon return home; her mother is undoubtedly worried. Even though news of incidents such as student protesters being beaten up in front of the university is not broadcast by the media, they quickly spread throughout the city by word of mouth. Sara and Dara exchange e-mail addresses and bid the first scene of our story farewell.

  Meanwhile, one of Sara’s classmates wakes up in her shabby rented room in a building near Tehran University. She had known there would be demonstrations at the university and had found it more prudent to stay home. She is a bookish student and doesn’t want any trouble. All she wants is to get her degree as quickly as possible, return to her small town, find a job, and help support her elderly parents who work two shifts a day … To prepare for her next exam, she was forced to stay up until four in the morning to memorize one hundred verses of poetry from one thousand years ago in their proper order. Exhausted, she opens her heavy eyelids. The first thing she remembers is that the night before she had forgotten to lock the door. She glances toward her small stereo—her only valuable possession—and, relieved to see it still there, she looks over at the door. Her eyes fill with horror.